In the manufacturing industry it is a common goal to optimize assembly techniques so that components can be assembled to produce a product in a minimum number of steps using a minimum number of components. This is particularly true in areas such as the automotive industry in which the final products, that is, motor vehicles, are produced in large volumes from a vast number of components. Clearly, if the number of individual components can be reduced and/or their assembly simplified, large cost savings can be gained.
Particularly, but not exclusively, in the automotive industry, the assembly of inner door handles to doors has entailed a relatively protracted procedure which has not lent itself to automation. On a typical assembly line, the door is first fitted with its lock mechanism and actuator rod (or cable) before the inner door handle is mounted. The inner door handle is in the form of a door handle assembly comprising a lock mechanism operating handle which cooperates with the lock mechanism actuator rod by means of an actuation lever integral with the operating handle, and a handle housing to which the handle is pivotally attached. In order to allow the operating handle to cooperate with the actuator rod which is normally within the door, the side of the door to which the assembly is to be fitted is provided with an aperture through which at least the actuation lever of the operating handle can project The door is also provided with suitable apertures to accommodate the handle housing.
The mounting of a door handle assembly of the above described kind to a vehicle door will be described in the following description. Firstly, the assembly-line worker brings the door handle assembly to a position slightly spaced from the door. He then reaches through the aperture in the door and grasps the actuator rod. The rod is carefully inserted into a clip on the actuation lever and the entire door handle assembly is pushed into the aperture(s) in the door in a plane perpendicular to the door. Once positioned in this plane, the assembly is slid back and forth in a plane parallel to the door in order to take up any slack in the lock mechanism. This slack is a result of inaccurate tolerances during the fabrication of the door, fitting of the lock mechanism and positioning of the respective apertures for the door handle assembly Once the slack has been taken up, the door handle assembly is fixed in place by means of screws passing through the handle housing and cooperating with the door. As is common practice in the automotive industry, a decorative trim panel is then attached to the inner side of the door by means of screws or clips at predetermined locations. In order to allow the door handle assembly to be accessed for operation, the panel is provided with an aperture Due to the necessary parallel sliding motion of the handle assembly during its mounting, the aperture in the trim panel must be large enough to expose the door handle assembly in any of its possible fixation locations. As a result, a gap of several millimeters between the trim panel and the handle housing is exposed on at least one side of the housing. In order to cover this gap, a finishing bezel is then mounted around the handle housing.
One attempt to simplify the above-described mounting procedure is described in SU 1370-212-A. This document relates to a door handle assembly which includes an operating arrangement in the form of a grippable operating handle and an auxiliary actuation lever, both journalled to a housing. The actuation lever is a double-arm lever with one arm being elastic and arranged to bear against the operating handle while the other arm is provided with a pair of angled projections defining a slot. The slot is intended to grippingly accommodate an end of a lock mechanism actuator rod which is held in a predetermined position within the door. The actuation lever is so as to be able to rotate independently of the operating handle over an adjustable range of movement delimited by an adjustment screw carried by the actuation lever and interacting with the operating handle. The mounting procedure for such an assembly is the following.
The operating arrangement is pre-assembled to the housing and the adjustment screw is slackened off completely. As the assembly is introduced into the door, one of the pair of angled projections abuts the actuator rod so as to thereby cause the actuation lever to rotate with respect to the operating handle until the slot of the actuation lever is aligned with the rod. Further displacement of the assembly towards the door causes the rod to latch in the slot and to be held therein by the pair of projections. The assembly is fixed to the door and the adjustment screw is used for adjusting the relative position of the operating handle and actuation lever so as to return the operating handle to a position in which it is flush with the housing.
The above-described arrangement allows the door handle assembly to be mounted to the door as a result of a movement of the assembly in a direction substantially perpendicular to the door.
Whilst the arrangement according to SU 1370-212-A offers advantages over previous mounting techniques, it is not suitable for automation due to the need for adjustment of the relative positions of the operating handle and actuation lever once the assembly is affixed to the vehicle door. In addition, the handle construction is relatively complex and relatively close tolerances are required to ensure that the slot on the actuation lever will align itself with the actuator rod.